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Today we're making available for testing the Haxe 2.10 Release Candidate.

At first, 2.09 was supposed to be the last 2.x so we can focus on 3.0, but we got so many nice things that we decided to make a mid-term release, still keeping best compatibility with 2.x, and allowing you also to enable some of the Haxe3 changes by adding a simple -D haxe3 to your compilation parameters.

Here's a very short list of the main things we got in 2.10 :

Java and C# targets ! compile with -java or -cs to output Java or C# source code ! Big thanks to Cauê Waneck which is working on this. It's still in beta, should be a lot better for 3.0, but you can already play with it, report bugs and improvements.

Reduced JS output : we worked a lot so that --dead-code-elimination really eliminates a lot of standard Haxe things from the output. As you can see on http://try.haxe.org/#1cf90, a simple Hello Haxe example will be reduced to only 7 lines of JS. We will still activate great features such as reflection, but only when you start using the corresponding API calls (such as Type.getClassName for instance)

Smarter Type inference : Haxe type inference got several levels smarter. It can now correctly infers the "minimal type" for constructs using multiple values such as constant arrays / switch / etc. , it can auto detects the expected enum in many cases, enabling you to use the constructor without the need to import it, it can now also do subtyping and variance on constant structures and arrays.

Macros reification : Haxe macros have been available since early 2011, leading to many successful usages. However it is often hard to manipulate AST enums by hand. With the addition of reification, macros just became much more accessible / usable.

A Haxe/C++ Debugger is on the way ! You should soon be able to debug your code interactively whatever the platform you target.

Languages improvements : we also made several small language improvements, which together makes Haxe a lot better :

Big thanks to the whole compiler team, and in particular to Simon Krajewski which have been of a great help with the compiler internals since he joined us.

You can download Haxe 2.10 Release Candidate on haxe.org, please don't use the automatic installer (or use the r4946 Windows installer here).

We need your help to test this RC and make sure everything is fine for a proper 2.10 release, which should happen in around two weeks, please report any bugs or regression issues that you might have by posting on the Haxe Group

Waw. Waw. Waw.I'm always really impressed by all the work that is done for Haxe : congratulations to all the Haxe team !I've been expecting all these new features for days (I check Haxe version everyday :D) and I think I'll not be disappointed.Good work.

Shalmu

Jun 25, 2012 at 10:39

Great! One thing: Smarter Type inference - can you provide us with a simple example? Because in my opinion, it could not be smarter before and I don't get how could it become even smarter :)